In the Stormy Red Sky-ARC

by David Drake

  Sun was skilled, trustworthy, and a companion from Daniel's first cruise in command of the Princess Cecile. The Learys expected loyalty from their tenants, but they gave loyalty in return. A good principle on the Bantry estate continued to be a good one when applied to the company of an RCN warship.

  Nearest the command console on the port side was astrogation, where Lieutenant Vesey was working on a course projection. Daniel could've echoed it to see what course it was—or asked her, for that matter—but it didn't matter.

  He doubted that Vesey was plotting their route to Paton and Karst, since she would've done that days ago when she'd learned the cruiser's mission. More likely she was preparing in case Captain Leary decided abruptly to raid some base in the heart of the Alliance, perhaps even the Castle System itself. It had happened before; and Vesey, while not a fighting officer with an instinct for the enemy's weakness, could be counted on to do anything that allowed her time for prediction.

  Midshipman Cazelet sat on the mirror side of Vesey's station, observing her plot but not involved in it. He'd been Adele's, well, protégé, one would have to call him: a youth who'd fled to her from the Alliance because she owed a similar debt to his grandmother.

  Daniel hadn't hesitated when Adele asked him to give Cazelet a midshipman's slot. Daniel had been impressed by Cazelet's skills when the fellow had travelled as Adele's assistant on the previous voyage; and anyway, he'd have backed Adele's judgment even if he'd disagreed with it. Adele was a Leary, now, for all she was Mundy of Chatsworth. The Learys took care of their own.

  Vesey and Cazelet had spent some of their off-duty time together. Daniel didn't consider that any of his business—another way in which he differed from many RCN captains—unless it affected performance.

  That had been a problem with Vesey in the past, and not simply involving her personal relationships. Though a crackerjack officer in most respects, Vesey had a tendency to hammer herself when things didn't go to plan. Most matters involving human beings and the cosmos generally went off the rails at some point, and when they did they were likely to take Vesey along with them.

  Still, if Cazelet managed to avoid getting killed the way Vesey's fiancé had been, it ought to be all right. The trouble was, violent death was a common hazard of wearing an RCN uniform.

  Borries, the Chief Missileer, was one of a dozen Pellegrinians aboard. They'd been captured on Dunbar's World and had decided service in the RCN was a better alternative than going home to learn exactly how angry their dictator was that they'd survived a battle which had claimed the life of his only.

  The missile station display showed a view of the dockyard, but Borries was looking past it toward the command console. He nodded when Daniel's eyes glanced onto him.

  He was Daniel's most doubtful appointment: he'd been a good choice for the Princess Cecile, but many Cinnabar-born senior missileers had bid for transfer to the Milton. Captain Leary had the reputation of finding a battle, and battles were the only chance a missileer had to shine.

  Daniel had nevertheless brought Borries with him. The Pellegrinian was skilled, but he was also willing to defer to a captain who liked to set up his own attacks. The last thing Daniel needed was a power struggle with a member of his own command group in the middle of combat.

  The missileer's mate was Seth Chazanoff. He was new to Daniel's command, a Cinnabar native with a flair for the short-range computations that were in some ways more difficult than the long shots more typical of space battles. He'd been chief missileer on a destroyer at a higher base pay that he'd get as mate even on a heavy cruiser. The fact he'd been willing to take a pay cut to have a better chance of practicing his murderous specialty was enough to convince Daniel to take him aboard.

  Across the compartment from the missileers sat Adele at the signals station, using her personal data unit as a controller for the console. Daniel assumed that there was some coupling loss incurred by slaving the larger unit to a small one, but when Adele was the operator, nobody would notice it.

  She didn't look up, but Daniel was pretty sure that his was the face inset onto her display. Adele preferred imagery to a physical presence and preferred recorded data to the evidence of her own senses. It worked for her, and what Adele did worked very well for the Republic as well as for her friend Daniel Leary.

  Midshipman Cory had the rear couch of the signals console. He had always struck Daniel as somewhat slow-witted—which wasn't, of course, a barrier to advancement in the RCN. The odd thing about Cory was that he kept learning—not quickly or easily, but consistently. He made mistakes that almost nobody else would've made, but he only made them once. There were successful admirals who couldn't say that much.

  Adele would be listening to intercepted transmissions while Cory was handling the ship's normal flow of communications. Daniel didn't imagine that any useful information would appear in the chatter of a private shipyard on Cinnabar, but it was habit and practice for Adele.

  She would do the same thing whenever her vessel was on a planetary surface. Several times her electronic eavesdropping had saved their mission and not coincidentally their lives.

  "Lieutenant Robinson," said Daniel. "Any anomalies to report, over?"

  "Sir, the ship is ready to lift," Robinson replied from the BDC. "Would you like me to initiate liftoff sequence, over?"

  No, I bloody well would not like you to take my new command up the first time I'm aboard her, Daniel thought. Aloud he said, "Negative, Three. Break. Mister Pasternak, you may light your thrusters in sequence, out."

  "Roger, Six," said Pasternak with gloomy enthusiasm. "Lighting Group A . . . now! Lighting Group H."

  The ship rang as though a pipe somewhere in her bowels were hammering. Steam roaring up from the pool smothered the hollow boom of the thrusters themselves. They were running at low output with their nozzles flared to minimize impulse. The Milton was coming alive, but she couldn't yet be said to be straining against gravity.

  Thrusters ionized reaction mass, generally water, and expelled it as plasma, lifting ships through the troposphere to where they could safely switch to their High Drive motors. Ships could lift from—and land on—dry ground, but their exhausts scarred the surface and hurled chunks out like a fragmentation bomb.

  If the thrusters hit a harmonic, they could set up a standing wave between the hull and an unyielding surface. A captain who reacted quickly could still land by changing the frequency or nozzle angle, but an inexperienced or ham-handed officer might flip his ship on its side in a heartbeat.

  "Lighting Group B," Pasternak reported. The pattern of the cruiser's minute rocking changed, though not in a fashion that Daniel could've identified if he hadn't known what it was. "Lighting Group G."

  Most large warships grouped their thrusters. The Milton's thirty-two nozzles were controlled in lettered quartets, starting from the starboard bow. Daniel knew that even with sufficient technicians in the Power Room to keep track of thirty-two separate thrusters, coordination would've been impossible. He missed the feeling of flexibility that the Sissie's individual throttles had given him, though he supposed—

  He grinned.

  —if he pretended that the cruiser had eight thrusters instead of eight sets of thrusters, it was the same thing.

  "Lighting Group C, lighting Group F," Pasternak said. The ship trembled again.

  The band across the bottom of Daniel's display was set to a 360° real-time panorama of the Milton's surroundings. Though the pickup lenses were on the upper hull, high above the surface of the pool, a blanket of steam and sparkling ions hid the view. Occasionally they gave a glimpse of the roof of the shop building.

  Even at minimal thrust, the Milton was starting to feel greasy. The thunder of steam and plasma would've made it impossible to hold a conversation on the bridge without the intercom and the sound-canceling field of each console.

  "Lighting Group D, Lighting Group E," Pasternak said. "All thrusters lighted. All numbers are within parameters. Six, we're green to go.
Five out."

  Daniel checked his schematic, not because he doubted the Chief Engineer but because he always checked his schematic. Each group was in the 95th percentile for flow, throttle response, and output. Furthermore, all four thrusters within each group were within 2% of their three fellows, which could be even more important.

  The pool was a roiling hell-storm as the sea rushed through a canal to replace the steam vaporized by the thrusters. In the cruiser's stern, two pumps sucked water up forty-inch tubes, continuing to top off the tanks of reaction mass till the very instant she lifted from Cinnabar.

  The Milton was bucking like a skiff in a riptide. It was time.

  "Ship, this is Six," Daniel said, raising the flow to the thrusters with the collective throttle. "Prepare to lift. I say again, prepare to lift."

  Often mass flow and nozzle aperture were handled by two officers on liftoff. At another time, Daniel might hand one or both tasks off to subordinates—but not now.

  With the flow at 80%, he smoothly rotated the vernier which caused the petals of the thruster nozzles to iris down, focusing the plasma which until then had been dissipated as widely as possible. The cruiser throbbed with intention.

  Thrust balanced gravity, then overcame it. The great ship surged upward on a pillow of steam and plasma.

  "We have liftoff!" cried the speakers in the voice of Lieutenant Robinson.

  The RCS Milton was headed to the stars on her first voyage under Cinnabar colors.

  CHAPTER 6

  En route to Paton

  Midshipman Else, holding the brass rod to her helmet with one hand, pointed the other gauntlet toward the blur of iridescence just to port of the A Ring topmast yard. Daniel stooped slightly while following the line of her arm with his eyes so that he kept his helmet in contact with the rod's other end.

  "C-6-7-9," Else said, using the four-digit terminator which the computer had assigned to that particular bubble universe. "C-6-7-3, then D-4-9-1 on this reach, sir. Is that right?"

  Her voice sounded thin but remarkably clear through the communications baton. On the hull of a starship in the Matrix, the only competing sounds were your own breath and your heartbeat.

  "I think you'll find that the computer solution will route us through 6-7-6, then 6-7-5 and into D Sector," Daniel said. He was amazed that Else—on her first real voyage out of the Academy—had correctly identified the visible stages of the Millie's course. "Why did you choose the route you did?"

  The batons were thirty-six-inch lengths of thin tubing, filled with a polymer gel that vibrated the way the column of air did in a stethoscope. An electronic signal, even a quarter-watt radio or the magnetic field generated by a charged wire, would distort the sail fabric. That in turn meant that the Casimir radiation which impinged on those sails would drive the ship in some uncertain—unguessible—direction through the Matrix.

  No electrical communication device was allowed on the hull of an RCN vessel, except by permission of both the signals officer and the captain, and that only in sidereal space. The RCN operated on the principle that if you eliminated all possible risks of mistake, then you reduced—not eliminated—mistakes.

  That didn't matter to the riggers who spent their watches on the hull and communicated with hand signals when they needed to. Experienced men didn't need to speak any more often than the elements of a gear train did. A rigger who needed regular instruction got it at the end of a bosun's starter of braided copper wire, heavy enough to sting even through the stiff fabric of a hard suit.

  The ordinary way to carry on a spoken conversation was by touching helmets. On most ships the need to do that was so rare as not to be considered. The astrogation computer determined the course and the sail plan which would best achieve it, the hydro-mechanical winches adjusted the rig, and the riggers corrected the inevitable malfunctions in the automatic systems.

  Daniel did quite a lot of talking on the hull. It was possible to read the Matrix and—if you knew what you were doing—to improve on the course that the computer chose based on calculated averages. Daniel could do it, thanks to his Uncle Stacy's instruction, and he'd found that he could pass on the techniques to at least a few of the midshipmen under his tutelage. Vesey was his greatest success, but Blantyre was coming along nicely also.

  The other reason for having a conversation on the hull was that it was the only place where you could be sure of not being overheard. Privacy wasn't possible in a warship with a crew so large that there were only enough bunks for the off-duty watch. For the most part that didn't matter; captains learned to keep their own counsel.

  But a captain who had a resource like Signals Officer Mundy available would be a fool not to utilize her. Daniel had acted like a fool more times than he could've counted even if they'd all happened when he was sober enough to remember, but he wasn't so great a fool that he didn't mull his knottiest problems over with Adele.

  Faced with a recurring problem, Daniel had designed the rods. He'd thought of going to Bergen and Associates, but instead he'd asked the maintenance overseer at Bantry to build them. A great estate was a self-sufficient community whose personnel were used to creating one-off solutions for particular tasks.

  The chance to do something for the young master—though Daniel had been disinherited, and after nine years in the RCN he didn't feel especially young—brought out the best in the tenants. The four rods which a delegation from the shop had brought to Xenos were polished till they gleamed, and the Bantry crest—three leaping fishes—was embossed on each.

  "Well, sir . . ." Else said. She turned, shuffling her magnetic boots on the hull to face him. It was possible to do that while speaking through the rods, but Daniel was used to the older technique of standing shoulder to shoulder with the other party while touching helmets. He saw no reason to change, since you couldn't see much of another person's expression through the plates of a vacuum suit illuminated by the Matrix alone.

  Besides, the splendor of the Matrix was the most wonderful thing in Daniel's life. He swam in its shifting magnificence whenever he found himself on the hull.

  "Ah . . ." the midshipman said, shuffling back in probable embarrassment when she realized Daniel wasn't going to face her. "6-7-9 is a high state, in the yellow-orange, and 6-7-3 has dropped into the deep blue, almost indigo."

  She gestured again to the points of light, whole universes rather than individual stars, in the glowing swirl.

  "It'll be some strain," she said, "but we have new rigging, and the gradients won't be excessive when the universes are in their current states."

  She coughed and went on, "Mister Cory says we should always look to cut stages where that's possible. It reduces our duration in the Matrix, and every stage stresses the rig and hull more than the differences between gradients."

  Daniel blinked; unseen, of course, by his companion. "Mister Cory told you that?" he said.

  "Yessir," Else said nervously. "Ah—isn't it right, sir?"

  Well, I will be buggered, Daniel thought. Aloud he said, "That's quite right, Else. If you take it to extremes, you'll jerk the sticks right out of her, of course . . . but that's certainly not the case here. You've proposed the course I've already loaded in the computer."

  The hull transmitted a quick metallic staccato. Daniel turned to look behind him.

  Hydraulic semaphores transmitted commands from the bridge to riggers on the hull. He stood with Else on the ship's spine, ten feet forward of one. The six arms clacked together at 180°, then spread with the message. A moment later the port and starboard antennas began to rotate on their axes while winches shook out their topgallant sails.

  Daniel cleared his throat. "Have you been talking a great deal with Cory, then?"

  The port B Ring antenna turned about fifteen degrees and stopped; those to fore and aft—Daniel checked—continued to thirty. He couldn't see what was wrong; it was probably a kink which prevented a shroud from paying out properly. Three riggers, hidden among the tubes and cables while they were motion
less, scrambled to clear the jam.

  "Well, sir . . ." Else said. She'd been watching the riggers also, perhaps to give herself time to refine her answer. "When we're studying in the midshipmen's berth, Mister Cory shows us things he learned from you. We'd heard about you—and Commander Bergen, of course—in our astrogation classes at the Academy. But, well, he's served with you."

  "Yes, he has," Daniel said. "And I'm pleased that he's passing on what he learned. It makes my job much easier."

  Daniel looked into the rippling, riotous beauty of the Matrix. If asked to bet last month, he would've given long odds that Cory hadn't retained—let alone understood—any of the instruction on reading the Matrix that Vesey as well as Daniel himself had provided. Had the boy become an astrogator when he had to teach astrogation to somebody else?

  "Fink, Triplett, and me're very lucky to have a senior midshipman like Mister Cory with us, sir," Else said. "I mean, the lieutenants are very good, and the instruction you have time to give us—this is wonderful. My classmates will be in awe when they hear. But Cory's with us all the time."

  "Some times you get lucky, Else," Daniel said. "We'll go inside now and I'll watch you set up the course you just eyeballed."

  Midshipman Cory appeared to have gotten lucky: he'd learned the trick that would allow him to become a successful RCN officer.

  And Captain Daniel Leary had gotten lucky too. The officers of his new command were shaking down very well indeed.

  Above Paton

  The High Drive motors buzzed, holding a 1g acceleration to give the Milton the illusion of gravity while waiting for clearance to land in Hereward Harbor. The vibration sawed at Adele's skull.

  She supposed her headache was a result of their strikingly unpleasant extraction from the Matrix. She'd felt as though ice water had replaced the marrow of every bone in her body. She didn't see an obvious connection between that and now feeling as though her head were splitting, but she doubted it was a coincidence.